Living out of a car with family members and couch surfing at relatives’ homes can wreak havoc on young peoples’ educations and lead many to drop out of school. Yet, a good education might be their best chance to build a more stable future. That’s why USF Learning and Writing Center students tutor dozens of homeless and disadvantaged San Francisco school kids each year, offering one-on-one assistance.

Josue Rojas met acclaimed USF graffiti-style muralist Estria Miyashiro ’92 at a pivotal moment, perhaps the pivotal moment of his life. He was surrounded by violence and hanging with the wrong crowd. Today, Rojas is an artist in his own right and just graduated with an MFA degree from Boston University.

USF architecture students have teamed with California parks and a cutting-edge preservation group to digitally record, preserve, and, hopefully, restore some of the state’s oldest buildings — California Missions.

USF’s School of Nursing and Health Professions (SONHP) has been recognized for helping to expand medical care to San Francisco’s most needy at a free clinic that serves patients far beyond its Tenderloin neighborhood address.

Communications major Sascha Rosemond ’15 talks about USF in the glowing terms that many reserve for a parent or spouse, saying the university’s impact has been immeasurable. Ask about her USF experience and she’s quick to recount how she unpacked who she was for the first time in Prof. Evelyn Rodriguez’s People of Mixed Descent class.

USF band Ivory Arrows has played numerous shows at university venues, debuted two EPs, and toured California and Oregon over the past four years. Now, the soulful indie pop trio has released its first full-length album — On the Way.

Does knowing Chaos Theory produce better nurses? The mathematical postulate is an integral part of USF’s online Master of Science in Nursing (RN-to-MSN) program, where nurses learn to take charge of complex and chaotic emergency situations to improve patient care.

Acclaimed Rolling Stone magazine cultural critic and San Francisco native Griel Marcus will visit USF on April 23 to talk about the state of popular music in the context of modern protest movements, including #BlackLivesMatter.

USF math students won the nation’s largest challenge-driven hackathon. They did it by developing a breakthrough application that reduced the online storage size of photos, while preserving faces in the images in crystal clear high resolution.

USF art and dance students recently stepped out of the recital hall and into county jail, where they put social change art theory into practice with inmates and soon found themselves breaking down cultural biases in surprising ways.

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has named USF doctoral student and high school English teacher Diana Neebe ’17 its outstanding young educator of the year, for her innovative classroom use of iPads and other technology.

When business student Dalal AlDilaimi ’16 was 3 years old, her country was transformed into a nightmarish inferno as the retreating Iraq Army set fire to hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells in the Gulf War. The devastating environmental and human health tolls were immediate and long lasting. Two decades later, AlDilaimi is a leading entrepreneur fighting to bring her country back from the brink.

USF’s Gretchen Coffman is leading an international rescue effort to save an endangered cypress tree on the verge of extinction. Coffman, a restoration ecologist, compares the Southeast Asia cypress to California’s majestic redwoods, and National Geographic is funding her campaign.

Next time you tune into StoryCorps on NPR, USF creative writing students may be interviewing a former hippy who moved his family to a teepee on Mt. Tamalpais after the Summer of Love, or a Jewish immigrant who survived the Nazi occupation of France, or a 97-year-old native San Franciscan who remembers when gas street lamps lit downtown.

Maria Poyer ’15 didn’t learn to read until she was nearly 14. She never learned phonics, and before she came to USF, she’d never written an essay. In fact, she’d spent less than four years of her life in school.

For Alexandra Morgan MNA ’00, the fight against cancer is personal. It played a pivotal role in her decision to become CEO of Family House — a San Francisco nonprofit that cares for children stricken by the disease.

Frank Turner, S.J., a leading international advocate on issues of poverty, social deprivation, climate change, and foreign policy, has been named USF’s new Anna and Joseph Lo Schiavo Chair in Catholic Social Thought.

Katie Finch ’14, a participant in this spring’s Criminal and Juvenile Justice Law Clinic, recently won a case for her client thanks to her dogged investigation skills. The charges against her client were dismissed moments before the courtroom trial was about to begin, and Finch’s investigation also led to another defendant’s acquittal in a related case.

Mallory Browne ’13 could have landed a cushy corporate job after graduating as a standout USF business-marketing student. Instead, she saw a chance to make a difference and help save lives working for an international nonprofit that leads HIV/AIDS care and research in 28 countries around the world.

When USF graduate researchers landed in Guatemala to investigate whether fair trade coffee was benefiting local coffee growers, they never imagined the experience would be turned into a novel about the country’s tug of war between rich and poor, its colonial past, and coffee marketers’ efforts to win international consumers’ hearts and minds.

Provide the disabled with wheelchairs and they will switch from begging on the streets to working. They will live better, more productive lives and increase their income by as much as 82 percent. Those are the conclusions Justin Grider ’14 came to after he spent two months in Ethiopia conducting graduate research that made international economists take notice.

Biology Professor Juliet Spencer has received two national grants to further her groundbreaking research with a herpes-related virus that infects 70–90 percent of the population and may play a role in the spread of breast cancer.

USF school counseling students are leading the charge to increase college enrollment among San Francisco students from low-income and immigrant families by providing free counseling in public high schools.

Taylor Heath ’15 thought about withdrawing from USF after her first semester. Today, she’s among the most connected students on campus. She leads the Black Student Union (BSU) as president, recruits USFers to join service-learning classes in her role as an advocate for community engagement (ACE) and works as a resident advisor (RA).

In May, USF nursing students traveled to one of the poorest regions in the country and set up pop-up health clinics to treat local residents who couldn’t afford to see a physician. Children as young as 4 years old, their parents and family members, along with many of the community’s homeless lined up by the hundreds.

USF school counseling students are leading the charge to increase college enrollment among San Francisco students from low-income and immigrant families by providing free counseling in public high schools.

There’s a class at USF that’s enrolled students as young as 18 and as old as 93, students who marched in civil rights-era protests and others who weren’t old enough to vote when Barack Obama was elected the country’s first African-American president.

Like most USF students, Marisela Esparza’s service-learning experience started by volunteering for a cause. Unlike most, it ended with her helping to organize a strike to win higher wages for thousands of San Francisco hotel workers. What began as a class requirement became a calling.

USF has earned a place on the Colleges of Distinction list of top universities for the third consecutive year, thanks to the university’s exceptional faculty, engaged teaching, successful graduates, and vibrant campus life.